Tuesday, December 22, 2009

I was reading Villainus's comment on my last post, where I described my annoyance with the Tankspot Typhoon strat, and while I do disagree with some of what he says, one thing struck me in particular. If you don't have a point to spare for Typhoon, you're wasting talent points somewhere.

At first I was annoyed because anecdotally speaking, I don't know any raiding moonkin on my server who use it and if one wants a greater sample size, the most common PvE moonkin spec does not include it (link generated by WoW Popular, formerly TalentChic). One has to go down to #5 on the list to find the first spec with Typhoon, which indicates that either a lot of moonkin are "doing it wrong" or it's really not as easy or necessary to spare a point as he suggests. Elitist Jerks does not consider Typhoon a must-have either, if you look through their moonkin article in their Theorycrafting Think Tank (recently updated for patch 3.3).

But, I run an unusual moonkin spec. You won't find it on WoW Popular at all. I suppose you could say I'm one of those "doing it wrong." I decided months ago that I didn't need my mana regen talents and dropped every single one of them. I even dropped the supposedly mandatory point in Moonglow and took a point in Genesis. I wasn't running out of mana. The dps increase from Genesis is marginal at best, but marginal is better than the zero, right?

If I could, I would take the point in Genesis and toss it in Typhoon, but I can't.

Villainus says that Typhoon is 2-3% of a high end moonkin's dps for any fight with at least two targets, which doesn't sound like much, but not bad for a one talent point investment. If I was to remove a point from my current spec for Typhoon it would be from Brambles, which is another marginal talent. This would decrease the damage done by my treants by 5% and my Thorns (I always thorn our tanks) by 25%.

My treants typically do around 30-31k damage. If I remove a point from Brambles they'll do 29-30k. If it's a long fight I'll cast treants twice. If it's a really long fight I'll cast it three times. That means at most I'll lose 3000 damage from my treants if I take out a point. That's not much at all. But what about Thorns? It's passive damage, but the boss isn't going to exactly stop hitting the tank, is it?

Our first 10-man Marrowgar kill, the boss took a whopping 74k from Thorns (not too shabby for a spell cast pre-fight). Taking out a point in Brambles would reduce that to 63k. Our first Marrowgar kill took seven minutes, so obviously the numbers generated by Thorns are better the longer the fight goes on, but we can look at Thorns as being roughly 10.5k damage for each minute of the fight; down 9k damage if I take out a point.

Let's get everything into similar time units. We'll go with three minutes since that's the time for Force of Nature to come off cooldown.

So for Typhoon to be worth it, it must do at least 5k in three minutes without disrupting the moonkin cast rotation (which would require more dps to be done by Typhoon to make up for the time the moonkin would normally be casting other spells).

I'm looking at it and suddenly it doesn't sound so bad at all. It's been a long time since I've been specced into Typhoon, but surely I could fit 5k damage over the course of three minutes when I'm running/shifting positions and I already have both my dots up.

Now, I still disagree that if a moonkin doesn't have Typhoon they are wasting points elsewhere, but for those who have the room, it looks like it's viable, and a better pick than a point in Brambles. Though, this does mean said moonkin will have to remember to cast Typhoon, because I'm not in the habit of it at all. And it does mean said moonkin will have to do a better job of pointing herself at the boss so the Typhoon actually hits him.

My guild's on a bit of a hiatus with the impending Christmas before us. We won't resume our regular raid schedule until January 4th (any other raid between now and then is purely optional and might consist of fun runs rather than honest raiding), so I can't say with any certainty when I'll get to try out a boss fight with Typhoon in my spec, but I think I'm going to give it a whirl and see how my World of Logs parse comes out.

I still won't be taking it for the knockback though, which was the reason for the eye-rolling in my last post. Now that I've read up on the 25-man strat I can see why that would be desirable since there are five blood beasts on Saurfang, but it's unnecessary for 10-man which only has two, and my guild only does 10-mans.

I'll also be glyphing [Glyph of Typhoon] to improve my ability to hit a target with it (wider radius) and use it when I can't cast anything else due to movement issues or to use as a cheap AoE. If it all works out, it should be a dps increase.

Of course when I show up with Typhoon now I'm going to have to explain that I don't have a knockback for it, but yes it really is Typhoon and seriously, I didn't decide to start PvPing on my moonkin.

4 comments:

I normally raid without Typhoon but once my guild made it to Saurfang, I dropped one of my mana regen talent points for it. It's worth it's weight in gold for that fight alone to control the Blood Beasts.

I don't use it on any other fight because, frankly, it's a DPS loss, and if you use it on adds, you NEED the glyph to eliminate the pushback. The pushback is the #1 reason you WANT Typhoon for Saurfang.

I still have no mana issues and will most likely just keep Typhoon in my build so I don't have to keep respeccing >.>.

I have found the Typhoon strat to be worthless on 10 man. However, it works great for 25 man.

In my guild's 10 man runs we just have ranged DPS burn them down quickly, kite if necessary. In our 25s we first tried me casting Hurricane to get threat, but one add always seemed to attack melee or a healer. We since changed it up a bit so that now our rogues cast Tricks of the Trade on me. This worked amazingly well.

If you're currently just running ICC on 10, I wouldn't bother with Typhoon. If you're running it on 25, it's a must.

I still don't see myself integrating Typhoon on a regular basis, but given what I'm giving up for it, and that I only plan to use it when it won't disrupt my usual IS/MF/SF/W/etc, it looks like it should be useful enough. That way it's there if I need it, and if I don't, no worries. :)

I might eventually hit up 25-man ICC when the pugs start going there, but for now I'm 10-man only so yeah, it's not necessary.

Happy New Year,Nice research done to look into the situation. Couple comments... I never said Typhoon was mandatory or you're wasting points if you don't have it. I said if you don't have a point to spare... you're wasting them - as in we have extra points that don't do much as it is and are easily transferrable to other subpar talents like Brambles or Typhoon or Frenzy.None of them are amazing, but I've found Typhoon to have the most overall benefits after tons of combat log testing and hard mode encounters. It really is the hardest talent to learn to use to it's highest potential. I use a thumb-ball mouse so I can turn in mid jump and typhoon directionally while not losing any forward momentum for example.If you're not in hard modes, you really aren't experiencing the heavier movement that allows for it to really shine.Also, while I agree Brambles is great for thorning up tanks, Marrowgar isn't representative of most bosses. He hits multiple tanks simultaneously with Saber Lash and hits more often. His thorn damage is going to be more significant because of this.Keep up the great work!